


I Have Lived a Thousand Lives

by reylo_garbagecan



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-22 00:41:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14297034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reylo_garbagecan/pseuds/reylo_garbagecan
Summary: A Goddess of the Force offers the Last Jedi and the Supreme Leader a chance to end the intergalactic war that they find themselves the center of. Though the offer is one they cannot refuse, as payment for peace, they must complete a set of trials for the Goddess, in which they will be given various placements in the galaxy, where they will be tasked with finding each other each time. As an element of struggle, the wily Goddess adds that one of them will remain conscious of who they are and what their mission is, while the other must play as an unwitting pawn in the Goddess' schemes.





	I Have Lived a Thousand Lives

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is my first time writing on AO3, and I'm very excited to get acquainted with the writing community here:) This fic is somewhat an attempt at canon-compliance, but the nature of the "trials" makes it more of a collection of AUs all within the Star Wars universe we know and love. I hope everyone enjoys my drabbles and thanks to everyone who took the time to click on, you all are blessings :')

The war had to end, they knew that. They knew they would have to sacrifice for it too. They just didn’t know it would have to be so strange a sacrifice. It was deep in a temple, a secret meeting of the highest proportions—a lovers' tryst—that the Goddess came to them. She spoke from the mist to them, Ben’s name—for that was what he chose to go by during these secret meetings—curled familiarly on Her tongue, as if She had spoken his name to him in his sleep long, long ago. He supposed She might have even known him long before the Fall, before the Awakening, and perhaps before he had even blinked his first seconds into existence. Maybe he had been an echo in the Force to Her from the beginning of time, for that was how ancient She appeared to them. A fair face, but Her eyes were timeless pools of swirling dust and stars and dark matter. 

So startled was Ben from their secretive confessions of hope and loss and love and abandonment by Her appearance that he had reached out to Rey both with his soul and with his hand. His mind grazed gently over hers without realizing he had done so on pure instinct as his callused fingers clasped around her own rough ones, uneven from years of biting sand and searing sun. No hand and no mind was more precious to him, he had discovered over agonizing months of being at war with her and her people. Even something as small as a strange woman appearing to them as they met in secret, Rey could soothe his anxieties over with nothing but lingering touch and a beam of light nudged through the air to him. So many times she had appeared to him at his times of greatest darkness. Enemies though they were by title, in the Force, they were made one and the same. Together, they could stop the intergalactic strife, and they intended to do so. 

The Goddess gave them a proposition once they recognized Her power for what it truly was. She offered them the peace they so desperately were seeking and failing to find. Through the Force, She offered an end to the bloodshed and the war and the First Order and the Resistance and the light and the dark. She offered the balance to all things. However, there was a price they had to pay. Ben had made many mistakes and committed many crimes. Both Ben and Rey had knowingly and unknowingly abused their powers within the Force on those weaker than they, bending others’ wills to their own. Neither were proud, and Ben was willing to pay penance for what he had done. What was the price to pay for peace?

Ben could not tell if the Goddess of the Force sounded old or young or somewhere in between when She spoke, Her voice so often lilted from somber and monotonous to shrill and child-like, “Complete my trials, and I will bring the end to your war.”

Ever the inquisitive one, Rey asked what seemed to be the very question the Goddess wanted her to have to ask, “What trials?”

The woman smiled in neither a truly genuine smile, nor a malicious one, merely neutral and practical, “Should you accept my proposition, I shall send the both of you to places in the galaxy and you must find one another.”

“That’s not so bad,” Rey breathed out in a strangled sort of relief.

Ben wasn’t so easily convinced, “There’s more to it than that. There has to be.”

A flash of something darted across Her eyes, and She seemed almost amused, “Always the glutton for pain, young Solo, and yet, always so perceptive. I am very aware of your strengths in one another, which is why I have devised this solution. Only you will have the awareness of who you are and who your dearest one is and what the mission will be. One will be punished for knowing and one will be punished with not knowing. Thus there will be balance.”

Dread knotted itself into the stomachs of the two young mortals. Ben turned to Rey and already knew what their decision would be, what their decision had to be. Without warning, he leaned down and gently captured her mouth with his own. It was a fleeting kiss, short in nature with an ancient Goddess scrutinizing them, but the tenderness of which it was made Ben’s heart lurch in pain as he softly pulled away. Rey’s eyes fluttered open in disbelief.

She pressed two fingers to her bottom lip as if she were feeling if the act of love had changed it somehow, and she murmured, “What was that for?”

A blush crept on his cheeks, and Ben did his best to tune out the prying eyes of the Goddess, “We have to do this, Rey. We have to take this chance to end the war, but I wanted you to know who I was the first time…”

He trailed off sheepishly, but Rey smiled despite the circumstances because she understood, “Thank you, Ben.”

Together they faced the Goddess, and it was Rey who spoke with a confident air of challenge in her tone that Ben could not possibly have mustered in his descent into melancholy, “We accept your conditions.”

“Wait,” Ben spoke up with something like desperation in his voice, “how many? How many trials are there? Will it go on forever? Will we ever be able to come back?”

The Goddess’ smile was compassionate—at least to Ben—then, “When you come back from my trials, you will come back to a world of peace.”

Ben nodded, satisfied then. Rey grasped his hand, and he held onto it as if he would never again be able to do so. A light poured into the cave they had met in and blinded them, and the last thing Ben saw was the calm face of the Goddess of the Force.


End file.
